About New Administrative Capital

Overview

The new “administrative capital”, expected to open in mid-2019 to the east of Cairo, is a large-scale project announced by Egyptian housing minister Mostafa Madbouly at the Egypt Economic Development Conference on 13 March 2015.
According to the plans, the city would become the new administrative and financial capital of Egypt, It will be a smart city using modern technologies for all services on site.
The city will eventually stretch over 490 square kilometers, with the first phase, which will take at least five years, encompassing 168 square kilometers.

Vision

The major reason for the new capital city is to relieve congestion in Cairo, which is already one of the world's most crowded cities, and it is growing rapidly. Greater Cairo’s population is set to grow from 18 million people to 40 million people by 2050. It will help to strengthen and diversify the country’s economic potential by creating new places to live, work and visit.
In order to draw people to this new capital city, a series of key catalyst developments will be established at its core. This will include a new government administrative district, a cultural district and a wide variety of urban neighborhoods.

Location

The new city is to be located 45 kilometres (28 miles) east of Cairo and just outside the Second Greater Cairo Ring Road in a currently largely undeveloped area halfway to the seaport city of Suez.
According to the plans, the city would become the new administrative and financial capital of Egypt, housing the main government departments and ministries, as well as foreign embassies. On 700 square kilometers total area, it would have a population of almost seven million people.

Plan

The city is planned to consist of 21 residential districts and 25 dedicated districts. It will be built as a smart city. It is planned that the transfer of parliament, presidential palaces, government ministries and foreign embassies will be completed between 2020 and 2022.
The new capital will boast the tallest building on the African continent. The city will also have a park double the size of New York City's Central Park, artificial lakes, about 2,000 educational institutions, a technology and innovation park, 663 hospitals and clinics, 1,250 mosques, 40,000 hotel rooms, a major theme park four times the size of Disneyland, 90 square kilometers of solar energy farms, an electric railway link with Cairo, and a new international airport at the site of the pre-existing Wadi al Jandali Airport currently used by the Egyptian Air Force.

Construction

• two pipelines will connect the new capital with the Nile, each with pumping stations with a capacity of 125,000 cubic metres per day. Eventually a third line will provide water from the Red Sea, presumably desalinated.
• During the first five-year phase, 240,000 housing units will be constructed, 30,000 of them underway now, with many nearing completion.
• The Council of Ministers building and a parliament building are under construction at the head of a long concourse lined by 32 ministries.
• The headquarters of the Coptic Church has been asked to move out there, and construction of a new cathedral twice the size of Cairo's main cathedral is already well underway. A grand mosque will be built across the street. The supreme court will move there as well.
• The New Administrative Capital for Urban Development is the company in charge of developing the project. It is a holding company with a capital estimated by 6 billion pounds. The company consists of the New Urban Communities Authority (NUCA), National Service Products Organization (NSPO) and Armed Forces National Lands Projects Agency.

Services

• The city will have its own financial district, where the central bank and stock exchange will relocate. Commercial and investment banks will be asked to transfer their headquarters there too.
• There will be at least six international universities from the U.S., Britain, Canada, Sweden, Hungary and France, according to the Ministry of Higher Education.
• The Capital International University (a public university) and the Canadian International College are already under construction.
• A 35-km-long central green belt covering 5,000 acres (2,100 hectares) will wind through the city's centre.
• The city will have fitness trails, a sculpture garden, an outdoor adventure park for mountain biking and rock climbing, a "healing and sensory garden", an "earth garden with canals and fossil trails", bicycle and pedestrian paths, horseback riding trails and waterways for canoeing and
sailing, a "floating forest", meditation gardens, reflection pond, a manmade river and a wetland park.
• There will also be a zoo and wildlife park, an aquarium with a dolphin show area, an arboretum and botanical gardens.
• According to a map, a new amusement park with a 250 metre Ferris wheel is planned. This would eclipse the current highest Ferris wheel, the 168-metre High Roller in Las Vegas.
• The city will also have a sports stadium, sports fields, an amphitheatre, an observatory, a museum of science and technology and an art museum.
• The site for a new opera house is already under preparation.

Transportation

• A new airport built specially for the capital has just opened, initially for domestic flights but eventually for international flights as well.
• Two rail lines will connect Cairo to the capital.
• An electric rail, already under construction, will use the existing Cairo-Suez rail line, but will go as far as Adly Mansour station at the very end of Cairo's third metro line.
• A second line, an elevated monorail, will eventually connect the capital to Cairo's south eastern outskirts.